Not Yet

Diego POV

My phone buzzed at exactly 3:52 in the morning.

I almost didn't pick it up. I almost let it ring out and rolled back over, because who calls anyone at that hour except wrong numbers and bad news.

Then I saw the name on the screen.

Aysha.

I hadn't heard from her in over 10 to 12 years. Not since her wedding, not since I stood at the back of that church and watched her marry a man I never trusted, smiling the whole time so nobody would see what it cost me.

I answered before the second ring finished.

"Aysha?"

"I need you. Please." Her voice was shaking so badly I almost didn't recognize it.

"Aysha, what's wrong. Where are you?"

"I'll send you my location."

"Don't move. I'm coming. I'm on my way right now."

I was already out of bed, already pulling on whatever clothes were closest, already grabbing my keys before the call even ended. My hands weren't steady. Something about the sound of her voice told me this wasn't a small thing.

The location came through as I hit the stairs. East side, near the highway bridge. Fifteen minutes if the roads were clear.

They weren't clear.

I ran two lights I shouldn't have. My chest was tight the entire drive, my mind running through every version of what could have happened, none of them good, all of them involving Adrian Hayes in some way.

My mind kept circling back to the last time I saw her in person, almost five years earlier, at a charity dinner neither of us wanted to attend. She'd smiled the whole night, laughed at the right moments, played the perfect wife for a room full of people who didn't deserve her attention. I remembered catching her eyes across the room once, just for a second, and seeing something exhausted flicker behind them before she caught herself and smoothed it back into place.

I should have said something that night. I should have pulled her aside and asked her if she was okay, really okay, instead of telling myself it wasn't my place anymore since she'd chosen him. I'd spent everyday regretting that silence, and now, speeding down an empty highway at four in the morning, that regret felt like it was about to cost me everything.

I saw the smoke before I saw the wreckage.

"No. No, no, no."

I pulled over hard, tires screeching against the shoulder, and ran toward the twisted metal that used to be a car. Her car. I recognized the plate even mangled the way it was.

"Aysha!"

Nothing.

I circled the wreck, my heart slamming against my ribs, until I saw her. Thrown clear of the driver's seat, lying several feet from the car, one arm bent at an angle it shouldn't bend.

"Aysha, can you hear me. Aysha."

Her eyes fluttered. Barely. But they fluttered.

"She's alive," I said out loud, to nobody, to myself, just to hear it confirmed. "She's alive."

I heard another engine somewhere down the road, headlights swinging wide before straightening and speeding off into the dark. Whoever hit her wasn't stopping. Whoever hit her wanted this finished.

That single thought changed everything.

I didn't call an ambulance.

If this wasn't an accident, and everything about a truck driving off without stopping told me it wasn't, then whoever did this would be watching the hospitals, watching the reports, waiting to confirm the job was done. If Aysha showed up alive on any official record anywhere, she wouldn't survive a second attempt.

I lifted her as carefully as I could and carried her to my car, laying her across the back seat. Her breathing was shallow, wet in a way that scared me more than anything else.

"Stay with me. Please stay with me."

I drove straight to Dr. Reyes.

He'd owed me a favor since the accident that nearly ended his career five years ago, the one nobody else would have covered for him. I'd never asked him to repay it but I was asking now.

He met me at the side door of his private clinic in his pajama pants and an old T-shirt, hair still messy from sleep, and one look at her in my arms wiped whatever he was about to say right off his face.

"Diego, what happened to her?"

"Car accident. I need you to keep this quiet. All of it. No records, no calls, nothing that puts her name anywhere."

"Diego, she needs a hospital. Look at her."

"If she goes to a hospital, she dies. I'm not talking about her injuries. I'm talking about someone finishing what they started tonight."

He stared at me for a long moment, then at her, then back at me.

"Get her inside," he said finally. "Now."

The next few hours blurred together. Machines beeping. Reyes shouting instructions to the one nurse he trusted enough to call in. Blood, more of it than I ever wanted to see coming out of someone I cared about. I stood outside the operating room with my back against the wall and my hands pressed against my eyes, praying to whatever was listening that I hadn't just watched her die twice in one night.

At some point the nurse stepped out for a fresh set of supplies and caught me still standing there, unmoving, my shirt still stained with Aysha's blood from carrying her into the clinic.

"You should sit down," she said gently. "Pacing isn't going to change what's happening in there."

"I can't sit."

"Family?" she asked, studying me carefully.

"Something like that," I said, because there wasn't a word that fit what Aysha and I actually were to each other, not friends exactly, not quite what I'd once hoped we might become before she married someone else, but something that had never fully let go regardless of the years or the distance between us.

She didn't push further, just nodded once and disappeared back through the doors, leaving me alone again with nothing but the sound of machines and my own ragged breathing to keep me company.

I thought about calling someone, anyone, just to hear another voice in the silence. But there wasn't anyone to call. Aysha's mother lived thousands of miles away and would only panic herself sick with no way to help. Her so called friends were mostly Adrian's crowd, people who wouldn't lift a finger for her now that she was supposedly gone. I was it. The only person standing between her and whoever wanted her dead.

That thought settled heavy and certain in my chest, and by the time Reyes finally stepped back through those doors, I'd already made peace with exactly how far I was willing to go to keep her safe.

It was almost seven in the morning when Reyes finally stepped out, peeling off his gloves.

"She's stable," he said. "Barely. Two broken ribs, a fractured arm, internal bleeding we managed to stop in time. She's lucky, Diego. Another twenty minutes and I don't think I could have done anything."

I let out a breath I'd been holding since 3:52 that morning.

"Can I see her?"

"She's not awake yet. Might not be for a while." He hesitated, his eyes narrowing slightly. "You want to explain why you didn't take her somewhere with actual equipment for this?"

"I told you. Someone tried to kill her."

"And you know this how?"

"Because the truck that hit her didn't stop, Reyes. Trucks that hit people by accident, they stop to at least check on who they hit and possibly look for help."

“Might be an accident and the person got scared and drove off out of fear of getting arrested.” He said rubbing a hand down his face, exhausted, and looked at her through the small window in the door.

"Anyways If someone is really trying to kill this woman," he said slowly, "and you're hiding her from the entire world to keep her alive, you understand what that means going forward. She can't just wake up and go back to her life."

"I know."

"She has to disappear completely. No name, no history, nothing that connects her to whoever she used to be."

I looked through that same window, at her chest rising and falling under the tangle of wires and tubes, and something in me settled into place, cold and certain.

"Then that's what we do."

Reyes studied me for a second longer.

"And if whoever ordered this finds out she survived?"

I didn't hesitate.

"Then they'll wish they never tried."